30.07.1925–present
Arturo Estrada Hernández
Arturo Estrada Hernández studied in a workshop in his native Panindícuaro, then at the Mexican art school La Esmeralda, where he joined the small circle of Frida Kahlo’s students known as “Los Fridos”. He painted walls of public and private buildings, from a pulque bar and a cinema to the Centro Médico metro station (1988). He has taught at La Esmeralda since 1948 and was its director from 1983 to 1985.
Biography
Arturo Estrada’s first wall painting was made in a pulquería, that is, a bar that sold pulque, and the wall has long been gone. How old he was at the time, the sources do not agree: by some accounts it was 1943, by others the wall appeared only after he had become one of Kahlo’s students.
He was born on 30 July 1925 in Panindícuaro, Michoacán. He began drawing as a child in the workshop of Miguel Moreno. In 1941 he moved to Mexico City to attend high school, and at the same time enrolled at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado “La Esmeralda”, the national school of painting, sculpture and printmaking. By some accounts he arrived there in 1941, by others in 1942. His teachers are said to have included Diego Rivera, Raúl Anguiano, José Chávez Morado and Frida Kahlo. When the school’s new director, the painter Antonio Ruiz, took over, Estrada moved into the group of Kahlo’s private students. There were four of them: Estrada himself, Arturo García Bustos, Guillermo Monroy and Fanny Rabel. They later came to be called “Los Fridos”. Together they began painting walls, among them the pulquería mentioned above.
In 1944 he began to work on his own. He joined an association of young revolutionary artists that supported the Mexican muralist movement, and he assisted Diego Rivera with the mosaics of the Anahuacalli Museum and later with the university stadium at Ciudad Universitaria. He also helped José Clemente Orozco with the exterior mural at the Escuela Normal. In 1953 he was an assistant to Juan O’Gorman on the stone mosaic “El Aire” for the Secretaría de Comunicaciones y Obras Públicas, the ministry of communications and public works. His first exhibition of easel paintings took place in 1945.
His own murals followed one after another. Among the early ones are named “Life of the Washerwomen” in Coyoacán and “Dance of the Tehuanas” at the Hotel Posada del Sol (1946). In 1951–1952 he painted a triptych on Mexican independence in a cinema in Cuautla; it is now partly destroyed. Then came “Bathers” in a private house in San Ángel (1952), the mosaic “Nuevo Laredo Yesterday and Today” (1957) and the acrylic mural “The Youth of San Luis Potosí and the Revolution” (1961) at the Casa de la Juventud in that city. Estrada’s work can be found at the Museo de Arte Moderno, in private houses in Mexico City, in Oaxaca, Nuevo Laredo and San Luis Potosí. In 1988, for the opening of the Centro Médico metro station in Mexico City, he painted the mural “Medicina Tradicional y Medicina Contemporánea”.
He works in acrylic, oil, encaustic and fresco, and makes mosaics from stone and Italian glass. He calls his art a “mixture of the popular and the hidden”. His palette is bright, and his subjects include folk customs, landscapes, flowers and fruit, but a good many works deal with poverty and the hardship of human life. He considers himself “a realistic painter, with a liberal ideology in tune with the people”, and believes that muralism is still alive in Mexico. His easel work is freer: the 2011 exhibition included pieces with elements of impressionism, neo-impressionism, constructivism and surrealism. The social theme remained.
His exhibitions have been held at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, at the Museo de Ciencia y Artes of UNAM, in the United States, China, Canada, Venezuela, Colombia, Bulgaria, Poland, Romania and the USSR, often as part of the Frente Nacional de Artes Plásticas, the national front of visual artists. In 2011 he had a solo exhibition at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, which had admitted him as a member back in 1954. In 1958 he travelled in Europe, and in 1976 he took part in the Berlin exhibition Intergrafik 76 and gave a lecture on Mexican muralism.
He began teaching at La Esmeralda in 1948, was its director from 1983 to 1985, and in 1988 received the title of professor emeritus from the Secretaría de Educación Pública, the Mexican ministry of education. He continues to teach there and to give workshops elsewhere, for example at the Universidad de Colima. His awards include the William and Norma Copley Foundation prize in Chicago (1957 by some accounts, 1954 by others) and the art teachers’ award of the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes (1966).
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